Barrette to name new MUHC board members
Two months after all 10 independent members of the board of the McGill University Health Centre resigned in protest against Health Minister Gaétan Barrette’s handling of the MUHC, the minister now has a slate of new names from which to appoint to the board, the Montreal Gazette has learned.
A recruitment committee submitted a list of 20 names to Barrette on Thursday, the deadline set by the minister. Barrette is expected to announce the new board members in the coming days as he seeks to reestablish control over the MUHC at the most tumultuous time in its history.
The five-hospital network has struggled amid budget cuts in the tens of millions of dollars, growing wait lists for surgery, emergencyroom overcrowding, and most recently, the near-strangulation of a nurse by a patient in the psychiatric ER of the Montreal General that left her disfigured (according to the criminal complaint).
Union leaders and senior MUHC managers have accused Barrette of underfunding the MUHC after it opened the $1.3-billion superhospital in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce two years ago, while West End members of his own Liberal Party have peppered him with questions.
Initially, Barrette intended to appoint the new board members by the end of July, but he decided to prolong that process after complaints by the Central Users Committee of the MUHC that he wasn’t consulting the community. In response, Barrette struck an eight-person committee, headed by prominent Montreal lawyer David L. McAusland, to submit a list of candidates.
One of the criticisms of the old MUHC board was that it did not adequately represent the mosaic of Montreal’s cultural communities and visible minorities. As part of Barrette’s administrative reforms enshrined in law, he must appoint board directors who represent the “socio-cultural, enthno-cultural, linguistic and demographic composition of the user population.”
He must also ensure the board “be composed of an equal number of women and men.”
Yet when Barrette formed the eight-person recruitment committee, he did not give it the explicit mandate to ensure such a representation.
Instead, he required that potential MUHC board members have backgrounds in governance, finance, real estate, quality management and user experience of social services.
Julie White, Barrette’s press attaché, declined to comment Friday on whether the list of candidates represents the greater MUHC community.
“There will be announcements at the opportune moment concerning the board of directors of the MUHC,” she said by email.
McAusland, the former chairman of the board of the Montreal General Hospital Foundation, was not available for comment.
The appointment of the new board members is critical, because the board must recommend a new executive director of the MUHC. That position has been vacant since September 2016, when Normand Rinfret retired.
Martine Alfonso (a former physiotherapist who was later promoted to associate executive director of the Montreal Children’s Hospital) has been serving as interim head of the MUHC.
Under Barrette’s legislative reforms, the health minister has gained the ultimate power to appoint not only the board members to a hospital but its executive director, too. Thus, the fate of the MUHC will ultimately depend on Barrette.